Data management delivers better results

Transportation company PITT OHIO makes over 9,500 daily deliveries to more than 14,000 unique locations. On any given day, PITT OHIO processes 9,000 to 11,000 new invoices. Each invoice is entered manually, in a process that has historically given greater precedence to entry speed than to data quality.

While understandable from an operational perspective, this rapid-fire data entry approach eventually created a significant duplicate data problem for the company.

Each variation in customer name or address information would create an entirely new customer record, meaning that a single entity could be represented by dozens of records in the database system.

SAS technology allowed PITT OHIO to discover and address problematic data, and to verify and merge customer records. Business users built data improvement workflows quickly and logically with the innovative job flow builder.

With SAS' capabilities, PITT OHIO was able to reconcile customer records, identify duplicates and reduce these multiple instances into a single master record. The company reduced 650,000 unique database entries into an accurate master repository of 10,000 records.

The results

PITT OHIO began the project with a goal of a nine-month implementation schedule. With SAS' flexibility and intuitive interface, deployment and learning time were significantly shorter than scheduled. This project, scheduled for nine months, was completed in just five.

PITT OHIO began the deployment with an expectation of an ongoing 95 percent data consolidation rate. SAS allowed the company to surpass this goal, giving PITT OHIO a consistent 99 percent consolidation rate.

Before implementing SAS Data Management, PITT OHIO's customer data management had been consuming significant amounts of time from the IT department and of multiple business users. After using SAS technology to increase the quality of customer data, PITT OHIO was able to manage this information with only a single business user.

PITT OHIO was able to turn its improved database into a competitive advantage. By refining its address information, the company was able to offer its customers more efficient shipping times and more advanced logistics than its competitors.

Now with the new, consolidated view of its customer data, PITT OHIO has been able to provide more targeted service, identify its most valuable customers and deliver competitive value in return.

Challenge

Rapid-fire data entry for as many as 11,000 new invoices each day resulted in significant data duplication.